In the fight for SEO results, every little bit matters. People download the best optimized Premium WordPress themes , battle for links from other bloggers, and search for the most micro-targeted keywords in order to produce only incremental increases in the traffic to their blogs. But sometimes, even when you execute all these parts of an SEO strategy to perfection, you still will not see the results you are wanting. Sometimes, even when your page ranks highly in the Google results, it won’t receive the click-throughs that it ought to. When this happens, it is time to look at two very important (but often overlooked) parts of SEO success: page titles and page descriptions.|
The Other Half
For all the effort that goes into getting great Google ranks for your pages, that is only half the battle. Especially now that people have to scan Google results to avoid paid advertisements, they are paying a lot of attention to the descriptions and titles of the pages that Google displays, and not only the order in which Google displays them. Even if you have dominated the top spot on a particular search page, you may not get the click-throughs your content deserves if you have not written titles and descriptions that catch a reader’s interest.
Optimize Titles and Descriptions
First of all, you should never leave it up to Google to determine your page’s description. Choose a WordPress theme or SEO plug in that lets you attach a page description to every post. Once that’s done, the descriptions that you write will generally show up in the Google results, unless they are totally irrelevant to the search term or the content of your page. If Google is choosing an excerpt every time, you aren’t selling your page as well as you could.
Look at Keywords
The best way to convince a reader to click on your Google link is match your descriptions to the keywords they are using. Look at the keywords that lead to your page, and make sure your page description addresses them. Your page title should include the most popular one or two keywords. And any keywords that aren’t included in your description or title should be included verbatim in the post, with nearby content that summarizes what you say about them. This way, Google will always be able to provide an excerpt that shows how your page is directly relevant to what the searcher is looking for.
Ilustration credit: http://onvizi.co.uk/
